Free Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey by Lori Perkins Page B

like champagne without the fizz—flat, bland, and ultimately discardable. But how much risk is too much? And who in
Fifty Shades
really has the lion’s share at stake?
    The obvious answer is Ana and certainly on the surface that is so. It is Ana who starts and ends the first book as the vulnerable ingénue to Christian’s jaded sophisticate. It is Ana, after all, who must cope with being whipped and trussed, blindfolded and belted. It is Ana who will require Advil and aloe and cuddling to recover from their encounters. It is Ana who is making all the concessions in their relationship. Or so it seems.
    “I do it for you, Christian, because you need it. I don’t,” she says in the final chapter.
    She may not need to be dominated, in fact she doesn’t need it, and yet she likes it—and likes it fifty shades of a lot. Her true pain isn’t found in the physical discomfort but in her emotional confusion, the cognitive dissonance she feels in being, on a very primal level, aroused by the punishment Christian inflicts. In the aftermath of her first light spanking, she bursts into tears, not because it hurts—of course it hurts!—but because she
liked
it. In contrast to Christian, who expects to enjoy their kinky encounters, Ana has no cognitive paradigm for interpreting her unanticipated sexual and emotional pleasure. Pain should be purely painful, and so it has always been, at least in her world. Pleasure-pain is a nuance she spends the entirety of the first book in the trilogy struggling to wrap her psyche around. Many of us struggle vicariously with her.
    And yet if there is a true sadist in
Fifty Shades of Grey
, it isn’t Christian Grey. It’s Ana, or rather what she refers to as her “subconscious.” Embodied as a pinched-faced, glasses-wearing librarian, Ana’s “subconscious” acts much more as a flogger than a wake-up call to self-preservation.
    “
Try to be cool, Ana
, my tortured subconscious begs on bended knee,” Ana says to herself when Christian turns up in the hardware store where she works and coyly purchases cable ties.
    Ana’s is the most
conscious
subconscious of which one can possibly conceive. More properly, it’s her masochistic
superego
that’s doing double duty to sabotage her relationship with Christian, with any man, from their very first meeting when she nearly does a face plant inside his office doorway. The self-flagellation continues throughout the book with internal monologue such as:
    “I still don’t understand what he sees in me … mousey Ana Steele—it makes no sense,” she silently laments, while continuing to covet her roommate Kate’s attributes. “She is irresistible, beautiful, sexy, funny, forward … all the things that I’m not.”
    Ah, Ana …
    Clearly it’s not Christian’s perennially “twitchy palm” that’s the punisher here, let alone his sophisticated array of BDSM devices, but Ana’s own insecurities and cognitive conflict, more properly the ongoing battle between her killjoy “subconscious” and her pleasure- and power-seeking “inner goddess.”
    Posed in direct contradiction to her “subconscious,” Ana’s “inner goddess” is a lush, Venus-like libertine who urges her on in furthering her sexual explorations with Christian, not only for the exquisite fifty shades of pleasure-pain to be had but, above all, for the power. Indeed, Ana’s “inner goddess” grooves and gorges on the increasing servings of feminine sexual power she derives from each subsequent sexual encounter. As the book progresses, it is Christian who loses strength and Ana who gains it. Ana may strike the posture of a submissive within his “playroom” but at the end of each and every encounter, he is driven to his knees, not only sexually sated but emotionally helpless and in her thrall.
    “You’ve completely beguiled me,” he admits fairly early in the book, and while Ana still holds onto her doubts, we readers do not.
    But then, as he rightly points out in one